Description
Book SynopsisExplores the embodied aspects of ownership and private property as these emerge in a range of American literary texts across the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.
Trade Review"Luck's focus on the phenomenological experience of ownership in the early nineteenth century is new and revealing. Whether looking at the frontier romance, the urban gothic, the domestic novel, or the plantation narrative, Luck convincingly shows how changing notions of property were intimately linked to evolving notions of embodiment and selfhood." -- -David Anthony Southern Illinois University, Carbondale "Written with force and grace, The Body of Property shows how antebellum literature stepped in to address questions that legal thought largely evaded: how do we come to own a thing? Why does property require bodies? Offering us a 'phenomenology of possession' in authors ranging from Brown to Stoddard, from J. P. Kennedy to George Lippard, Chad Luck provides a genuinely new account of the cultural work undertaken by antebellum fiction, as it thinks through embodiment and possession in a range of social locations: frontier, parlor, plantation, cityscape. This is a terrific book, well-researched, theoretically nimble, and full of interpretive insight." -- -Jonathan Elmer Indiana University "Luck combines a truly impressive archive of antebellum writing, legal and cultural history, Enlightenment philosophy, and phenomenology with an innovative methodology to tell a new history of property in American literature and culture -- the history of what property feels like, from the body to the spaces of the home, the plantation, and the city." -- -Jennifer Greiman University at Albany, SUNY
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements Introduction - Pierson v. Post and the Literary Origins of American Property American Literature and the Problem of Property Property in Antebellum Culture A Phenomenology of Property The Space of Property Chapter One - Walking the Property: Ownership, Space, and the Body in Motion in Edgar Huntly Condillac's Statue and the Primacy of Touch Touching on the Other: Bodily Frontiers and the Production of Space Walking the Property: Mobility and the Appropriation of Space Chapter Two - Eating Dwelling Gagging: Hawthorne, Stoddard and the Phenomenology of Possession Possession without Acquisition: Eating, Enjoyment, and the "Beginning of Property" Home Bodies: Domestic Space and Possession Proper Mother's Milk: Private Property and the Feminine Economy of the Gift Chapter Three - Anxieties of Ownership: Debt, Entitlement and the Plantation Romance Southern Discomfort: Debt in the Slaveholding South Owning and Owing: Woodcraft and the Phenomenology of Debt Slave Narrative and the Senses of Entitlement The Structure of the Debt: Swallow Barn and the Space of the Plantation Chapter Four - Feeling at a Loss: Theft and Affect in George Lippard A Culture of Theft Distress Signals: Theft, Body, Affect Kleptophobia and the Architecture of Loss Invasion of the Body Snatchers: The Market in the Grave Epilogue - Wisconsin, 2004: Racial Violence and the Bodies of Property Notes Works Cited
